Since June 2025 a lot of event marketing has claimed that captions are now legally required in Europe. That is mostly wrong, and the confusion is unhelpful for the people who actually need captions. Here is the honest version.
This is background, not legal advice. Obligations vary by country, sector and contract — check yours.
What the European Accessibility Act does and does not cover
The European Accessibility Act — Directive (EU) 2019/882 — has applied to products and services placed on the EU market since 28 June 2025. It covers a specific list: computers and operating systems, ATMs and ticketing machines, e-readers, e-commerce, consumer banking, electronic communications, passenger transport information, and access to audiovisual media services.
A conference in a hotel ballroom is not on that list. If someone tells you the EAA requires you to caption your keynote, ask them which service category they think it falls under.
What the EAA does reach is the software and platforms around your event: a ticketing site, a registration flow, a streaming service. Those are e-commerce and audiovisual media services, and they are squarely in scope.
What usually does oblige you
In practice, three things drive real captioning requirements far more often than the EAA:
Public procurement. If a public body is paying, accessibility criteria are typically written into the tender. In the EU, procurement rules require technical specifications to take accessibility into account for services used by natural persons. This is the single most common reason an event has to be captioned — a contract clause, not a directive.
National disability law. Member states have their own frameworks, several of them older and broader than the EAA, and they often bind public events, education and publicly-funded culture.
The standard everyone actually cites. EN 301 549 is the European accessibility standard for ICT, and it incorporates WCAG 2.1 level AA. When a tender says “must be accessible”, this is usually what it means in practice.
The part that has nothing to do with law
Roughly one in five adults in Europe has some degree of hearing loss, and the proportion climbs steeply with age. At a 600-person conference that is over a hundred people, most of whom will not ask you for anything. They will simply follow less of it than everyone else.
Captions also help a much larger group nobody counts: anyone following a session in their second language, anyone in a noisy overflow room, anyone who missed a proper noun and wants to see it spelled.
What “good” looks like at an event
- Captions on the venue screen, in the floor language, large enough to read from the back — not a browser window dragged onto a projector.
- A second route on attendees’ own devices, so people can choose their language and their text size without asking anyone. This is also what makes multilingual accessibility affordable: the cost of the fortieth language is the same as the first.
- A transcript afterwards, which serves both accessibility and everyone who wants to quote a speaker correctly.
- Latency you can live with. A caption that arrives after the speaker has moved on is worse than useless — it desynchronises the reader from the room.
Where SCAPTION fits
SCAPTION was built for the AV booth rather than for a compliance checklist: captions go out as a transparent NDI source or chroma-key HDMI into the switcher already running the show, in 50 languages, with attendees free to read along on their own phones at no charge per person or per language.
The transcription-only Accessibility plan exists precisely for the case above — a lectern, one microphone, one language, captions on the screen because people need them.